Public wide area networks like the Internet are operated by hundreds of Internet Service Providers, each responsible for a segment of the network. No single entity in this public environment is responsible for how packets are routed from beginning to end. Thus, packets traversing the Internet often encounter congestion, significant jitter, and even loss. For some communications more than others, such as, for example, voice over IP (VoIP) communications or other real time media communications, it is important to provide preferential delivery service to avoid the uncertainties of traversing the Internet. However, the public Internet generally does not provide end-to-end QoS guarantees desired for VoIP communications. It is typical to overcome the limitations of the public Internet with moving the Voice communications to private networks, such as MPLS, where Quality of service (QoS) guarantees help provide such preferential delivery service by ensuring sufficient bandwidth, controlling latency and jitter, and reducing data loss.
Unexpected call bursts may also affect call quality of existing and future calls. With respect to customer contact centers, existing solutions attempt to manage such unexpected call bursts. Such solutions may monitor available contact center resources such as, for example, servers, agents, and media ports. If shortage or failure of a particular resource is detected, a particular action is triggered. For example, the action may be to keep a calling party on hold if shortage of agents are detected, switch to a backup server if failure of a current server is detected, or monitor a number of active calls and alert a systems administrator or refuse establishing conversations for new calls once a threshold is reached. Although such solutions may be acceptable to situations where a single contact center (referred to as a tenant) utilizes system resources and where such resources are predetermined and pre-allocated, it may not be acceptable in situations where multiple tenants are supported and resources are shared. In addition, such existing solutions do not take into account the quality of established voice conversations in efforts to provide a particular level of quality for the established voice conversations. Furthermore, existing solutions generally do not allow a buffer for gracious and gradual degradation of service. For example, existing contact center systems may abruptly start refusing new conversations when a particular threshold is reached, which may result in negative end user experience and loss of customers for the contact center.
Accordingly, what is desired is a system and method for managing voice and other media traffic associated with contact centers when such system supports multiple tenants that share resources.